Leila Marshy (Cayoup1)

Leila Marshy has won the $10,000 Danuta Gleed Literary Award.

The annual award, now in its 29th year, is administered by the Writers’ Union of Canada and recognizes the best first collection of short fiction published in English by a Canadian author.

Montreal-based Marshy won for her collection  My Thievery of the People, published by Baraka Books, where Marshy is also an editor.

Marshy was one of five authors shortlisted for the prize. The runners-up are Caitlin Galway for A Song for Wildcats (Rare Machines/Dundurn Press) and Mikka Jacobsen for Good Victory (Freehand Books). All shortlisted authors receive $1,000.

My Thievery of the People was also shortlisted for the Quebec Writers’ Federation Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. Marshy is the author of a previous novel, The Philistine, and editor of the 2025 anthology Razing Palestine: Punishing Solidarity and Dissent in Canada.

A jury comprised of writers Waubgeshig Rice, Anuja Varghese, and Lisa Alward, determined the winner and runners-up.

The collection is “a fierce and dazzling debut [that] scrutinizes the legacies of colonialism and patriarchy with an unflinching eye to the damage wreaked on both oppressed and oppressor,” the jury said in its citation. “Travelling between the Middle East and North America, and assuming a breath-taking array of fictional modes, from naturalism to surrealism to magic realism, these tightly crafted stories are remarkable for the alchemy of Leila Marshy’s prose, slipping from the ordinary to the menacing in the blink of a sentence, and the moral complexity of her vision.”

Previous winners of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, which was first awarded in 1998, include Curtis Gillespie, Zalika Reid-Benta, Ian Williams, Norma Dunning, Heather O’Neill, Kim Fu, Lisa Alward, and last year’s winner, Canisia Lubrin.